Announcement: For those of you who can't get enough of me (don't all raise your hands at once), I'll be part of a panel discussion called "Survival Strategies for Struggling Artists" this Wednesday, October 19, from 3 - 5 pm, at The Foundation Center, 312 Sutter Street. My topic-- "Selling Art Online"-- about 15 minutes.

Comment: I'll be blunt on this one-- the SoMarts Day of the Dead exhibit is one of my favorite shows of the year, and one of the best shows San Francisco has to offer-- especially on opening night. Go see. If you've never been to one of these, trust me-- it doesn't disappoint, and it gifts you with a whole lot to think about. Installation art at its selfless best honoring those who have gone before us. Runs through November 2.

Comment: The Grand Opening of a significant new non-profit arts facility which includes approximately 75 artist studios. This premier event features The San Francisco Community Orchestra-- and they're good-- my first symphony-in-a-warehouse experience ever. Approximately twenty studio spaces are still available with sizes ranging from 150 to 2000 square feet. Studios are on the second floor; workshops and art making facilities on the first floor. I've seen lots of warehouse studio spaces over the years and these are exceptionally nice. Special added bonus-- below-market rent.

Comment: New York artist Steve Powers incorporates pop culture catchwords and images into his "modern day cave paintings," using those words and images to reflect on core human emotions and experiences like love, hate, jealousy, and trying to understand art. He's there at the opening, gas mask and all, painting away, so we can see how he does it. New York artist Joe Amhrein makes art out of words co-opted from critical art writing, and his background as a sign painter allows him to do this exceptionally well. (Myself, I'd rather abduct critical art words and rocket 'em off to planet Zork-- permanently-- except mine, of course.) Tauba Auerbach's statement is so impeccably abstruse I can't extract a shred of sense out of it. Tauba-- suggestion-- if you make a claim like "various languages we use to encode our world in order to systematize it and make it manageable, consistently take on lives of their own and we often end up at 'their' mercy," give an example of such a language, how we encode it, and how we end up at its mercy. Make it fast, keep it simple, and we all lived happily ever after.

Abstrusities aside, this is another entertainingly thought-thick show courtesy of one of my favorite San Francisco galleres, The Luggage Store. By the way, I'm not sure who made this piece, but as I get to the top of the stairs and step into the gallery, the first thing I see is a large inflated distorted limousine scrunched angular into the back end of the gallery, reminding me of how pathetically little it takes to boost the self-esteem of the overwhelming majority of the American populace.

Art (Joe Amhrein - like it).

Art (Tauba Auerbach - like it).

Art (Steve Powers - like it).

Joe Amhrein - art.

Tauba Auerbach - art.

Stever Powers - art - I asked him to smile; can you tell?

Art (Joe Amhrein).

Art (Tauba Auerbach - like that suspended 'yes').

Angular ego enhancement art.

Meniscus.

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Needles and Pens: Paintings and Installations from Allyson Melberg and Jeremy Taylor.

Comment: I thought the gallery was between shows and they were in the process of putting up the next show. Silly me.

Comment: The most interesting artworks here are several Brook Caballero watercolors. He composes them on a computer and then paints the images entirely as watercolors. I had trouble figuring out what they were until I asked him because, to me anyway, the subject matters looked different than art evolved entirely in-brain.